


Just A Machine

by Freya1970



Category: Terminator (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Clones, F/M, Forced Marriage, Kidnapping, Other, Smoking, Suicide Attempt, Surgery, Swearing, descriptive nudity
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-06
Updated: 2018-08-31
Packaged: 2019-06-23 01:12:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 16,360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15594933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Freya1970/pseuds/Freya1970
Summary: Uncle Bob works at a quarry. Sarah plays a stay-at-home mom and John is tired of getting kidnapped.





	1. Desert Rescue

Sarah Conner could feel the heat bubbling up from the still below the catwalk where the both of them were standing. Like a sacrificial victim, the machine dangled above the molten pit. No fate but what we make, Reese’s voice echoed in her mind. The machine had become the father figure John never had; her silent mantra joined into the fray of the emotions that were reeling in her heart and mind. She shut her eyes and in with a silent prayer, she pressed the button that would seal all of their fates. It was the most selfish thing she had ever done in her life. The machinery above their heads groaned to life. John was hugging her tightly, whimpering. There were too many variables involved to leave things to chance.

 

“What are you doing?” Uncle Bob asked as the chain he was cradled in began to lift the machine away from the fiery pit below.

“Changing the future,” she replied over the sounds of molten metal and grinding machinery. The machine had elected to make this move. Too easy.

Too Logical. 

* * *

 

_One year later, near Sky’s Reach, Nevada, near dusk._

A rabbit hopped across a quiet roadway. Taking its time with each little hop. Its long velvet ears twitched. Something was coming. Startled, it bounded quickly off the road. A car zoomed by barely missing the animal. It wasn’t alone. Soon a throaty sounding motorcycle followed in its wake. The rabbit bounded away, continuing its journey in search of food.

Sarah clung tightly to ‘Uncle Bob’ as the rushing wind whipped and tugged at her long sandy blond hair. Through her twenty dollar sunglasses, Sarah could see the outline bastard who had kidnapped her son through the back window of his car ahead of them. John had disappeared two days ago after school. The plates, the description of the car, as well as the description of the asshole driving it all fit. Then the boy who was riding in the back turned around. Fuck it was John! She pulled out her 9mm Beretta from where she had stashed it in the waistband of her jeans, switched off the safety, carefully chambered a round and took aim at one of the car’s tires.

John smiled, beaming with pride at the sight of the arrival of his Mom and his so-called ‘Dad.’ He turned to his new found friends Becky and Jake who were skulking in the floorboard of the back of the car like they had been for most of their ride in beaten up Chevrolet that he had dubbed the road trip from hell and smiled at them. “It’s going to be okay now.” Mom was awesome at rescuing him! “I told you nobody kidnaps me and gets away with it,” John told the asshole in the driver’s seat.

“Shut up, kid!” Their solitary scruffy looking kidnapper shouted from behind the steering wheel of the car. The kidnapper was an older man, who he guessed couldn’t be any more than twenty-five suddenly looked very nervous. And he should be nervous. Without much of a warning, John was falling into the floorboard of the car landing near the other kids when their kidnapper turned the squeaking and rattling automobile sharply off the highway, heading across the desert.

Bob followed the car off the road without slowing down. He was saying something to her, but she couldn’t make out anything he was saying over the roaring wind and gunfire. She fired the gun again. Missed. Damn the monster vibrations that the stolen hog was producing between her thighs were causing her aim to be off. She shot back. She’d missed, hitting the ground behind the car instead. Why the hell Bob had opted for this mode of transportation was beyond her. But it didn’t matter so that John didn’t become another face on a milk carton. With that thought in mind. She concentrated her aim at the left rear tire and fired. She hit the bumper instead. Fuck.

She was about to squeeze off another round, but Bob snatched the gun from her hand.

The car veered to the right sending a cloud of dirt and rocks flying their way. Bob swerved, managing to dodge most of the flying debris the vehicle had kicked up in its wake. “We’ll need the vehicle in drivable condition,” he explained as they caught up with the tail end of the car. “Take control of this,” he said right before he leaped onto the back of the car.

“Fuck! I hate when he does shit like that,” she grumbled, quickly sliding into the driver’s position on the bike, struggling to gain control of the now driverless motorcycle. He hadn’t jumped on another car like that since the factory last year, but still, it made her nervous. His virtual indestructibility didn’t mean that he was indestructible, it just said it took a lot more to damage to kill him, and without him around she didn’t want to think about that. Instead, shifted her thoughts to John.

Becky and Jake screamed, holding onto John tighter than had been after his Uncle/Dad landed on the trunk of the car with a loud thud. It only took John a moment to figure out what Bob’s intentions were. “You’really screwed up, jerk off,” John shouted over the sound of the complaining car as it tore across the desert ground.

“Get down,” Bob shouted from the other side of the back window. John covered his younger friends bodies with own in the floorboard, making sure they were all facing down. He heard the back window shatter. He looked up. Bob had punched a sizable hole through the rear window of the car that had sent flying glass everywhere and was now working on enlarging it. The vehicle began weaving left and right as if their kidnapper had been boozing all day. He told his friends to keep their heads down. Bob held on tight as the car continued to weave unable to make any more progress.

Sarah considered her options. She had no weapon. Bob, despite his robotic grip strength, was barely hanging on to the swerving car. And John’s kidnapper looked like a half-crazed sex-starved man (if one could judge a man’s sexual frustration solely by their appearance), and the motorcycle’s fuel was swiftly becoming an issue with each passing moment.

Desperate times called for extreme measures. There was nothing like a  woman on a motorcycle. At least, that’s what she had heard in some of the bars she had visited over the course of her life her life. She only prayed that none of the children were watching (especially John).

Desperately, he steered the car left, and then back over to the right over and over again. The jerk that was hanging onto the back of his car was very persistent, but it would only be a matter of time before he lost his grip. It was the deep throaty rumble of the engine of the Harley-Davison motorcycle pulling up next to him that caught his attention.

He looked, not once but twice.

Oh, fuck…he had died and gone to fucking heaven.

The blond bitch that had been taking shots at him earlier was smiling at him. His eyes drifted downward. Oh, sweet fucking heaven. She was holding onto the handlebars of the motorcycle so that he had the perfect view of her perky naked tits bouncing just like they would be if he had been fucking her. She was what he would label as an instant hard-on, and now that he thought about it, he had one.

Oh, the things he could show her…. He knew some tricks that he was pretty damn sure no one else knew.

When he didn’t think his dick could get any harder she began to lick those luscious lips of hers. She was a desert Valkyrie coming to take him to heaven on a Harley. His friend Randy wouldn’t believe this! He forgot about the kids in the back. He ignored the man who was dangling from the trunk of his car. His mind just went blank. He steadied the car, driving straight ahead across the desert instead weaving like had been to get a better view of the angel riding on the Harley next to him. Whether she was an angel from heaven or hell, it didn’t matter. He was aching for her. He needed her. He required …release. He began to rub his bulging erection through the thick material of his jeans. Now she was sliding her hand along one of the motorcycle’s grips. Oh fucking God! Now she wanted to jerk him off! He was already close to coming in his jeans. She was so fucking hot; she’d turn a gay man straight—.

Her diversionary tactic had worked. The perv had been too busy drooling over her to notice that Bob had finally managed to crawl into the backseat of the car through the broken back window, knocking the bastard senseless with a single punch to the face. The car swerved towards her; she steered the bike away. She followed the vehicle till Bob had crawled into the driver’s seat pushing the asshole out the way before she engaged bike’s brake. With a thumbs up signal from Bob, she slowed the motorcycle until it came to a halt in the middle of the desert where after a few moments she shut it off. For a moment she thought she had managed to rouse an emotional response from the killer cyborg. But now when she thought about it, Bob’s face had only registered the same blank expression he wore when he wasn’t interacting with a group of people outside of ‘their’ family. The signal had just meant John was safe, which was more critical to her than her bruised ego.

Jake was staring at John, his mouth gaping open. “Wow, John, your Mom sure is hot!"

John didn’t know what to think. He had never thought of his Mom in that light. While she was indeed hot, she was still his Mom. If anything he felt proud. They were safe! He poked his head up and looked over the front seat where he could see his mother pulling on her black tee-shirt, her back facing them in the distance that she had managed to keep with her during her little show on the bike. “Hi Bob,” John said feeling both relieved and happy about his timely rescue. What a pair of heroes he had at his disposal!

Bob turned and revealed the other side of his face. The damage to his skin wasn’t severe, just a couple of scraps here and there that would heal in a couple of days. It had taken him a couple of weeks but the old injuries that he had gotten during the chase to the factory a year or so ago had healed, and they had also managed to fix his hand to its almost new condition. “Your mother’s diversionary tactic was…”

“What?” Hot? A penthouse dream? Something every man should see before they die? He wasn’t dumb. He and his friend Tommy had found Tommy’s older brother’s not-so-secret stash of porno magazines. He knew that she was his Mom, and he was only eleven, but he'll just an insane person would have looked the other way or a girl. His Mom was centerfold material. But then again she was his Mom. The ick factor of imagining his Mom in a centerfold layout of a porno magazine was too significant to ignore. He pushed those thoughts quickly out of his mind.

Bob looked as though he was contemplating the correct answer while he stopped the car just short of where his Mom had parked their ‘new’ bike. She hurried over and opened the passenger door. “Unique.”

She smiled at Bob’s appraisal of her tactic. It had not only caught the jackass that was out cold, sprawled over the front seat, caught between sitting in the front passenger seat and the floorboard off guard but it might have sent a slight tingle through one of Bob’s logic circuits.  “Damn straight it was.”

 Sarah never did like being left out of a plan. It had saved her boy, and that alone had made it worthwhile. She’d play Lady Godiva on a motorbike over and over again if it saved John’s life.

“Hello, Sarah,” Bob said, his eyes hidden by his dark sunglasses. His expression still didn’t register any form of emotion. It was as if he hadn’t seen a damn thing. Great. The one time she rode a motorcycle topless in her life, and all she had to show for it was two whispering pre-teen boys (and one had been her son!), an unaffected killer cyborg and a fucking pervert. So much for her ego.

“Hello, Bob,” she said, pulling the jerk who had kidnapped her son out of her seat. “Throw this pig in the trunk,” she instructed, as the ‘pig’ moaned from landing abruptly on the ground. She should leave him there to rot. But that would be too easy of a death for him. The asshole needed to suffer, wiping the free titty show he had just witnessed from his mind.

“All right, Sarah,” said Bob getting out of the car to obey what she wanted him to do.

Sarah turned and looked over the front seat behind her with a smile. John was carefully clearing the broken shards of glass out of the back seat of the car. For a second she was worried that he’d hurt himself, but he’d only complain about not being trusted. She heard the perv on the ground next to her moan as Bob grabbed him by the shirt collar and he dragged the asshole towards the back of the car.

“So kids…want to go home now?” Sarah smiling at all the kids in the car.

The kids in the back looked tired, scraped up and hungry. The rear end of the car bounced as Bob tossed the perv into the trunk of the car. He looked pissed, as he should be. The ruse of their existence as a happy ‘couple’ had been nearly destroyed by this little adventure. She wondered if he truly worried about things like most men did. Money, his house, his family, and his job. Doubt it. Nothing ever upset him, except when she had called him at work when John had gone missing. He had demanded more information from her that she had. She had looked for John for two hours before calling him. Around the school, his friend’s house, the homes of friends that he thought she didn’t know about and arcades. He hadn’t been anywhere to be found. She was sure Bob would have left his job at the quarry then and there and started looking for John on his own had she not demanded that she be taken along. He hadn’t argued. He had just hung up the phone afterward and showed up at ‘their’ home sometime later in the car that they had to abandon at a gas station some two hundred miles away with a busted water pump. That’s where they had picked up the bike after last night’s dinner. She was worn out. She hadn’t slept for two days. Either she had been too worried about John or helping Bob sort out the clues that the perv had left behind to get any rest.

Bob slammed the trunk lid closed. “Yay,” shouted the kids in the back.

 

“Thought so,” she said with a smile. Their enthusiasm was warranted. “Anyone hurt?” she asked, first glancing at the girl who had brown hair and blue eyes and then the younger boy who was clinging to John. Now it was a matter of finding out who they were and where they lived.

 

“John, are you ok?”

 

“I’m fine, Mom. We’re all fine,” John explained. His left eye was black and blue. The perv in the trunk had punched John, knocking him out two days ago. So that’s how he had gotten John in the car. It made her proud that he had put up a fight to the point the piece of trash had to resort to knocking him out to get in him into this death trap of a car. He knew better than to get in a car with a stranger. That had been her first and foremost objective to get through his skull when he was a child, that the only person John could trust ever was his mom. And now—she turned her gaze to killer cyborg of the hour which was sitting next to her — Bob. “He hadn’t…he hadn’t done anything to us yet.”

“Yeah, I don’t think he was going to be the one who would hurt you guys.” The perv preferred half-naked grown women riding motorcycles in the desert versus little kids. But apparently, he made his living kidnapping little kids and selling them to those who did. Fucking asshole.

“Why’s that?” Of course, he wanted to know why. John, like any kid his age would.

This was one of those times though she didn’t want to explain everything to him. He’d have to settle for trusting her. She was tired, her skin stung from the dirt, and the rocks were hitting her while she was playing Lady Godiva for the peeping tom in the trunk. Bob got took that as his cue to start the rattletrap of a car. “When you’re older I’ll tell you all about it.”

“Always when I’m older,” he groaned. The kid wasn’t stupid; he’d eventually figure it out on his own. Hopefully from her explaining it to him and not any other way. Hell, she hadn’t explained it thoroughly to Bob yet. She doubted he’d give a flying fuck though. He was limited in who he really ‘cared’ about which only, in her opinion, included John. His little stunt jump from the motorcycle showed her he only was concerned about John’s safety, not hers.

“Be grateful that you didn’t find out the hard way,” she said, breathing out a sigh of relief. She needed a cigarette. But she hadn’t bought any for herself in the last two months. She was trying to quit, but now this little adventure was over she needed one bad. But John would only have Bob explain in grotesque detail what would happen to her if she continued to smoke. But that didn’t kill her need to have one.

“Please fasten your seat belts,” Bob said as he shifted the old shit car into drive.

“Oh man….” The kids whined in unison. The adventure was almost over and they, of course, wanted more ‘fun’ forgetting the fact they had been scared to death not an hour before.

“Safety first,” replied Bob. Safety first, eh, Sarah thought. Then why do you a have a fucking gun stuffed in the front of your jeans with the safety off? She never really looked at his groin area. He was just a cyborg programmed to kill. But for a killer cyborg, he looked fucking good. It was times like these that she regretted he wasn’t a real man. All those beautiful looks wasted on a cyborg that had to fake being her husband and John’s father around their growing circle of friends. They had to play the part sometimes; otherwise, he was like he was now, just a machine.

She met his gaze. He was glaring at her again. Oh, that. If they didn’t have those other kids weren’t in the car with them, she’d give him the bird. Reluctantly, she pulled on the seatbelt buckled herself in then. She flicked on the air conditioner as the Bob peeled out dodging the abandoned Harley at the last possible moment. It was a shame, damn it. Leaving a perfectly good motorcycle behind like that in the middle of the desert was a crime. But it had been a hell of a ride. If it hadn’t been for the worry over John, it could have been the best time she had since they blew up Cyberdyne together, dealing a deadly blow to Skynet. “Let’s just drop the asshole in the trunk off at the local police station and then we’ll take the other kids home.” She leaned her head against the cold glass of the passenger window as the pathetic excuse for an air conditioner finally managed to begin blowing cold air in her direction. She closed her eyes and let sleep eventually overtake her.

“Safe Sarah,” Reese told her. The bright light blurred his image. “You and John are safe now.”

Somehow she didn’t believe that. “You’ve changed the fate of everyone on Earth for the better.”

“But John and the machine are still with me.” Her only education in paradoxes was a twilight zone episode from television where when a guy altered reality of his mother, but since he had changed her fate, he had changed his existence, leaving her to be alone to helpless to drift in outer space…alone. Did anyone know how paradoxes worked? Probably not. It probably was some bullshit that scientists made up to put food on their table so they could go out and do whatever scientists did in their spare time. That would make them everyone else, making a buck to survive. Just like Miles Dyson had been doing for his family before his life had been cut short.

“Remember, Sarah, you can’t change the past, but you can change the future by the choices you make. Your future is on a different track than the one you and John were destined to live through before. But that doesn’t mean Skynet won’t try something else in the reality where I’m from.” It made sense. But now Skynet would not only have to cross space/time to change its fate now but realities. The thought of it was trying to do that scared her. Was Skynet so powerful that it could tell that its existence had ceased to be and try to do something about it? That would mean it had God-like sentience. 

“Will I see you again?” Seeing him again, alive and well, no matter how old she was, would be fantastic. Painful, but wonderful.

“In this reality, no. But doesn’t mean I love you any less.” She swore she could have felt his feathery touch against her cheek then. “It just means you can live a long and happy life now.”

“And the machine?” She wondered if she could find it in her heart to destroy him. He’d grown on her. He was part of their misfit family now. He worked without complaint, and the list of his merits went on and on.

“Keep him by your side. Don’t let him fall in the hands of those who would use him for their dubious purposes.” Like Cyberdyne. Though its headquarters in the States had gone to hell in a handbasket, they still had a software division that operated out of somewhere in India.

“I’ll always love you,” she said as both Reese and the light began to fade.

She woke with a start.

It could have been a combination of the sudden change in temperature characteristic to Nevada nights and the sound of nearby rustling trash on the ground that had woke her, or it could have been the sudden the realization that she’d never see Reese again. The latter would explain why she had felt fresh tears streaming down her face.  Bob and Johne were probably inside eating dinner while they left her waiting alone in the car. 

Typical.

Looking down at her lap, she had found that Bob had given back her gun to her, leaving it in her hand. It was over. She was living in an alternate reality where she’d never meet the man of her dreams again, and if she did he wouldn’t know her, much less love her as he had before. She was too miserable to go on. She chambered a round then switched the safety off. John was safe. The machine would take care of him. She pressed the gun against the bottom of her chin. They would be fine without her. She pulled the trigger, the hammer fell, but the gun didn’t fire the bullet. She dismantled the weapon in the dark quickly, using the light from the flickering McDonald’s sign above the car to see. 

Oh hell.

The fucking robot had taken the firing pin out before he had left the gun with her.

Bob knew her too fucking well.

Damn him.

Bob was always there and always watching--still preventing her from ending the misery that was her so-called life. One day he’d fail. One day she’ll die, and there wouldn’t be a fucking thing he could do about it. 

After all, he was just a machine.

 

 


	2. Marriage

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You giggling teenagers beware, lots of talk of the birds and the bees here! Well, of course, there is, Bob is only trying to fit in :P.

 

There were a lot of next days after her little stunt in the McDonalds parking lot.

There was the next day that the other kidnapped children had been returned safely to their parents in joyful, teary-eyed reunions. Becky Ann’s meeting with her parents was especially heartwarming. Father and Mother clung to their daughter, crying, letting the emotions swell over them, and then they had exuberantly invited Becky Ann’s escort, her white knight who happened to be John, in for dinner. At first, she had thought the worse, that it had been some ploy to lure John away from them, but Bob hadn’t made a move from the shadows where they were watching. Even heroes went to jail after blowing up an office building.

Perhaps…life would somehow grant her son a normal upbringing. But after looking Bob with the faintest tear in his skin revealed that under the man was a machine. A machine made to kill humans…all humans. What would stop him from killing her and John in their sleep if he experienced a glitch in his programming? She was sure nothing would. He would just walk in and blow them away had it been the case. But the news was full of scenarios where husbands had ‘glitched’ in their emotional programming and murdered their family while they slept. In that respect, there was no difference between Bob and a human male. It was a ‘what if’ scenario that haunted every woman or for that fact man that entered any relationship. The only difference was that she was smart enough not to marry or associate with any real assholes like that.  
Five minutes had passed since John had gone in. “We’ll have to figure something to do about those nicks you have on your face if you’re going in to work on Monday.” Oh hell, how typical suburbia of her.

Bob ran his hand over his face, checking, and diagnosing his wounds. She wondered silently to herself what it was like in his mind. It at least had to be more orderly and disciplined than her own. “My wounds will be repaired in twenty-six hours, ten minutes and—”

  
“I’m hungry,” she said, cutting him off before he could rattle out his special countdown to the nearest nanosecond. She headed to the car. Bob turned and joined her.

“Are we going in to have dinner with, John?” Bob asked her.

“No, too risky,” They couldn’t chance to make any new ‘friends’ outside of their current circle of friends who were not so in the know about what went down last year. They lived in a mobile home park outside of LA where people where people were more accepting of Bob’s idiosyncrasies. Like his ‘insomnia’ problems. His ability to remember to take out the garbage on time every week. His ability to scare the fuck out of any neighbor kid that decided to use their small yard for a playground with just a glare from any window in their ‘home’. His overprotectiveness of John, causing would be bullies to run away with just him showing up after work. His ability to never forget something at the store. And his punctuality was unparalleled to any man she had ever known. When he said he was going to be somewhere at a specific time, hardly anything got in his way to cause him to be late. If only he were human…. But he wasn’t, and that had always been a stumbling block for her to trust him completely. “We’ll have takeout,” she said, getting in the passenger side of the rattletrap, knowing Bob would be relentless in pointing out her flaws in her driving ability until she caved and let him drive. “Or something. We can’t stand here skulking in the bushes. Noisy neighbors might begin to wonder.”

“Wonder about what?” he asked her as he got in the car. After some coaxing Bob finally managed to get the car started, and after she buckled her seatbelt; he peeled out in classic Bob fashion. She smiled and shook her head at him. Show fucking off.

“Because we were standing out there in the dark.” It was strange that she could be comfortable setting charges to blow up a building. But she felt uncomfortable standing alone in the dark with him, and until John’s kidnapping she had scantly been alone with him, and when they had been alone, it was only for a couple of hours, where he was busy doing chores that neither John or she wanted to do. That was one good thing about having their very own cyborg living with them, he didn’t bitch about ‘fairness’ or lecture either one of the about equality in work or complain about how fucking tired he was. He just fucking did the chores she assigned him. She particularly enjoyed watching him wash the dishes. It was hilarious to think she had a killer cyborg at her disposal and he was standing there washing the goddamn dishes not complaining one damn bit about it! The thought made her smile.

He made a right turn and then they were on the main drag of the Becky Ann’s hometown. “You mean like how Missus Williams suspected that I was a cat burglar even though I am not programmed to steal felines?”

She remembered that night. It had happened a month after they had moved into the park. She had gotten a frantic phone call from an anxious Mrs. Williams about how her ‘husband’ stalking her place in the middle of the night. She had to get him before the police arrived. John had explained his ‘Dad’s’ peculiar behavior as his father having flashbacks, explaining to them why he was he was armed to the teeth while sleepwalking. And the police had bought it hook line and sinker.

“Bob…John was spending a night at a friend’s house. There was no need for you to be standing outside dressed in black leather while armed to the teeth—”

They passed by a local restaurant, and her stomach rumbled in protest. They couldn’t eat just anywhere. It was one thing to eat at a McDonalds where some teenager was running the late night shift at McDonald's where they were the only ones eating there versus a restaurant packed full of people who would start asking questions about Bob’s injuries.

“Sarah that is the thirty-second time you have lectured me on that subject since the incident occurred six months, three days and—” Oh ho! He was copping an attitude. For a killer cyborg with a limited emotional range, he indeed had developed a sarcastic manner.

“But that’s the same thing as we were doing,” she complained.

“No, it’s not, Sarah.”

Now he wanted to lecture her. “Please tell me how the fuck it’s different?”

“I am not as you say it, armed to the teeth, I am wearing a white t-shirt and jeans, and—”

Details. Details or variables as he would most certainly call them. “And what?”

“You were standing there with me.”

“What are you implying, Bob?” she wondered. What the hell difference did it make to him? “That we looked like we plotting to rob Trent’s house while we were standing there in the dark. Or perhaps instead we looked more like lovers meeting up for a make-out session or that it could be that they just guessed that we’re—I mean I’m a worried parent waiting for my son to come back out of a stranger’s house.” They passed by another restaurant and then a gas station. Damn, I could use a pack of cigarettes right now. She probably could smoke them all. Bob, the guardian cyborg, had set her on such an edge.

“Since we weren’t visibly prepared to rob anyone your first premise has a viability factor of twenty-five percent.” Oh no. What the fuck had she gotten herself into this time? “It’s probable that any onlookers who had seen John enter Becky Ann’s home on a Friday evening had correctly deduced why we were standing there waiting that corresponded with your third premise at a zero point seven percent. If we had decided to wait any longer than five minutes the onlooker’s perceptions that corresponded with your third premise will most likely decrease every ten points five seconds, while increasing their perceptions to correlate your first premise by forty percent simultaneously.”

His little academic assessment made her head spin. He tended to do that whenever he was trying to make a fucking point. “Well, thank god they don’t think—”

He turned the car down another street. Why didn’t he just pick one? If they had been home now, she would have already cooked them supper. “I wasn’t finished with my analysis of the situation, Sarah.”

“What the hell. I’ll humor you this time then. Go on with your logical analysis, Bob.”

“However, given the situation, I have determined that perception of the elderly lady who witnessed us standing in front of Trent’s house was influenced by not only our appearance but our proximately to one other and the temporal difference between John entering Trent’s home and when she discovered us waiting outside of the Trent’s home. There is a ninety-five chance that she believes we were there too—”  
So the fuck what! “Enough! I don’t care if the old bitty across the way thought we were there to make out. For all, she knows we dropped off our kid for the night so we can go fuck in the woods.” That would never happen…ever.

“The closest wooded area—”

“Is it fucking Godzillaville?” There that would throw a fucking wrench in his logic circuits. It usually did.

He turned into the empty parking lot of a K-mart at the end of the main drag. He had run out of options for places to eat near Trent's home. He hit a curb, and the car bounced and squeaked so much it sounded like it was about to fall apart. Fuck they need to get their car back. “Is that another one of you’re made up words or places, Sarah?”

Bah! He hadn’t taken the bait that time. “Yes.”

He turned back onto the highway in the shit car they were in again peeling out as they left the parking lot. He drove them down the road, and a gas station came into view. God, did she need a nicotine fix? “Turn here.”

Bob complied, pulling the rattletrap into a nearby gas station. Slowing down to a halt in front of the storefront. “What do you need from here?”

“Cigarettes,” she breathed as she unbuckled herself.

Bob slammed his foot down against the gas pedal, squealing tires and they shot forward through the small parking lot and back into the roadway traffic. “John doesn’t want you to smoke anymore. I won’t comply with your request.” Bastard. She glared at him, but as usual, he ignored her.

She fastened her seatbelt again or else she knew he’d do it for her.

They had turned around again in a parking lot, where he stopped the car before they turned onto the roadway again. “This town does not appear to have a KFC, Sarah.”

Oh, he had been looking for her favorite fast food restaurant. She was sure he probably had a list of places she and John liked to eat out, and that was usually the place she wanted to go. “I can see that.” Bob turned back onto the roadway. Now all she had to do was—“Stop there at the burger barn; instead, we’ll eat in the car.”

It was a carhop type of place. It was her second favorite type of fast food restaurant. Because it provided some privacy while one knew what was going on around them. “But you said that we shouldn’t eat in the car.”

“This isn’t our car,” she said as he pulled into one of the car stalls and stopped. He shoved the car in park and turned off the engine. The engine died with a lurch. “So we can eat in this wreck.” Yeah, it had been her rule but sometimes rules, as she had done so many times before, were meant to be broken.

She unbuckled her seatbelt and leaned forward to look at the menu. “I’ll take a number seven with no pickles, and you’ll take a number three with no chili on the hotdog. We’ll both have a Pepsi to drink with an order of onion rings for me and fries for you,” she said to him. He never knew what he ‘liked’ so she had to at times at strange places like they were at now; she had to tell him what to order at joints like this.

“Remember to switch on your—”

“Human interaction protocols before ordering yes. That is the twenty-first time—” It was a program he had developed and written himself, and he was always upgrading and changing it. It’s the only way he could get away with talking with other humans and work with them without suspecting that he was ‘different’ from everyone else.

Fuck, she didn’t want to argue she wanted food. “Alright already.”

She could tell when he turned on the program. He began smirking like a jackass. His Mr. Hyde to his Dr. Jeckyll. He ordered for them both, sounding quite part of the grumbling human male who had been forced to go out on a date with his wife.

  
“Sir, I’m sorry I didn’t hear the last part,” said the young teenage girl over the speaker. Sarah laughed softly at her response. Now girl had asked for it.

“Why don’t you get your speaker system fixed so you can?” Bob replied with a shit eating grin on his face. So he _was_ enjoying this.

Time for her to play her part. “Darling, be nice,” Sarah said sincerely her gaze meeting his. She leaned closer to Bob to get closer to the speaker. “I’m sorry he’s had a rough day at work.” She offered the fake apology. “He said I'd come in and get it.”

“We could just bring it out to you.”

Great, now Bob wanted to argue the point. “Trust me my wife needs the exercise. She’s getting flabby around the middle, you know.”

“Bob!” Where the fuck had that come from? She glared at him, but he only continued to smirk in return.

“Okay…sir. We’ll let you know when it’s ready.” The young girl sounded scared.

“Nice touch,” she said, offering him a sardonic smile.

“Thank you,” he replied in his normal robotic tone. “Do you wish for me to shut down the protocol program?”

“I don’t know. It’s growing on me,” Sarah lied. She hated the damn program. It wasn’t who Bob was.

“A simple yes or no will do, Sarah,” he said irritably, with more of a human quality than she expected from him. “You know sometimes you can say ple—”

“Yes, Bob.” His smirk disappeared almost instantly, losing his hyde personality along with it.

Their order was ready in what she guessed was record time. She opened the door to the old vehicle with it. She slides into her seat next to Bob. The smell of the food only made her stomach growl. She shut her door and stared at him for a moment. Of course, he wasn’t demanding his food. He didn’t need it. “So here we go,” she said, sorting out the food and drinks between her and his meal. “You better eat it, after all—”

“It speeds my repairs to my tissue and muscular components,” he said taking the food that she had sat next to him. “I had intended to eat the food I ordered, Sarah.”

Wow, he was more bitchy tonight than usual. “Sorry,” she said, more out of the habit of being polite than feeling sorry she had irritated him. He gathered his hot dog and took a bite out of it and chewed it just like she and John had shown him. She had nearly died laughing the first when he had eaten one, he had shoved the whole thing in his mouth and swallowed it whole in a single gulp, in front of fifteen people when they were shopping for a place to live.

“Sarah, may I ask you a question?” he asked when he had finished chewing the last bite of his food. Now he was cleaning off his hands with a napkin. That had taken a little longer to teach him because of the differing opinions on table manners. John had to also potty train him. After all, everything that went in had to come out, and Bob had been no different. She might be a Mom but to hell with teaching a grown…man/machine How to go to the little boy’s room as Bob would say it. John had damned him to be the laughing stock of his co-workers at the quarry she was sure of it.

“Sure, anytime,” she said after she had finished her last bit of food. It was the first time Bob had a direct question for her. Sarah began to drink her Pepsi to wash down her meal.

He seemed to contemplate how to ask his question. Must be important, she thought. “What does intercourse feel like?” he asked seemingly out of the blue.

The Pepsi she had been drinking went down the wrong way and came back up into her nose and mouth and exploded all over the windshield. “Where did that question come from?” she asked, coughing and hacking on the drink. Did he want to know about sex? Why the fuck would he care? He didn’t need it. It didn't drive him like the rest of the animal kingdom was.

As she was dabbing off of her shirt from the mess she had made with the soda, Sarah noticed that he was glancing at her. You know…like that. As if he was contemplating her… as his…well, they were married, but only out of necessity. They had done the deed in Las Vegas six months ago. Bob had suggested that being married made things less complicated as he had put it, to explain their living arrangement. Being John’s Uncle,

 Bob hadn’t cut it with anyone. John couldn’t have been happier, but not her. She couldn’t have been more nervous or confused. But for the last six months, they had been Mr. and Mrs. Robert and Sarah Conner. No way was she going to change her last name to Schultz or anything like that as he suggested. They had just explained that it was pure coincidence that they had ‘fallen in love’ with someone with the same last name. It had happened with her Aunt Sandra, so why couldn’t it occur to her? Now six months after they got married he was asking about—sex.

“I have been thinking about the subject for—” he began “awhile.”

Awhile? For him to use a relative term like ‘awhile’ was unusual.  Bob seemed to be afraid to disclose that he had wanted to have sex with her. (As an experiment no doubt. Surely the boys at the quarry had been asking him about his sex life and probably couldn’t come up with a right answer why he hadn’t had sex with her…ever). Sarah guessed that he didn’t know how to approach her about it or was he programmed o philosophize about sex while he was blowing humans away? Knowing him as well as she did, it was probably the latter.

  
“Why would a killer cyborg want to think about intercourse, when it’s—well—generally sex propagates the species in which you are primarily programmed to terminate?”

“It is within my parameters to learn. Please do not refer to me as a killer cyborg. I’m Bob.”

  
Oh great, leave it to her put him in such a pissy mood. “Why because it would blow your cover if I did?” She could be just as sarcastic as he could.

“You had the opportunity to terminate me, Sarah. Why didn’t you?”  
Not that again. Turnabout is fair play. “For the same reason why you took the firing pin out of my gun last night.” I wanted you around to make sure the future turns out alright, and when I die, you’ll be there for John.

“Given that you have attempted to terminate yourself on three separate occasions in the past year. I left nothing to chance.” She closed her eyes and fell back against the seat.

Breathe, Sarah, breathe. Bob had to bring up that again, didn’t he? The first time when she tried to overdose on pain pills that she had been prescribed to her for her gunshot wound. Sarah’d taken them all a week after they moved into their new home. Bob had found her when she was dosing off and had raced her to the hospital on John’s order no doubt. 

Sarah had been put in a mental ward for two weeks for that little stunt. Then she had sliced her wrists shortly after their wedding day, Bob stopped the bleeding and sewn her up then and there. John had been away, but that hadn’t meant that he hadn’t instructed Bob to ‘take care’ of his Mom. Last night…she had yelled at him for screwing with her weapon, and good old Bob managed to conclude that she had tried to kill herself again last night. It had been about wanting to be with Kyle the whole time. John had Bob, she, however, had no one.

“Then why give me my gun back?” Outside traffic continued to rush by, a classic Beatles. And fuck, it would be her luck that it was ‘Let it be.’

“It belonged to you.”

That was a brilliant explanation. One of a kind. Thanks, Bob. “This conversation is warped.”

“You haven’t answered my question about intercourse.”

“Well, you tell me, Bob.” She didn’t have a clue how to relate her sexuality to that of a machine’s. “I’m sure Skynet has programmed you to—” she said stuffing a fry in her mouth. She glanced at him. He was beyond handsome. Bob wouldn’t have any trouble finding some barfly to conduct his little sex experiment with.

 “Well you know,” she said, suddenly feeling shy. Sarah Conner, your thirty-eight not some seventeen-year-old and well beyond being a virgin. The thought of her shying away from a conversation about sex was laughable. She was like any other woman in the world. She enjoyed a good fuck every now and again. But not with him, she thought as she glanced at Bob. Never with him.

  
“Fuck someone?” Her ears burned with embarrassment when Bob had come right out and said that. Rarely did he ever say fuck. Sarah herself was much more proliferate in using swear words than he was.

“I guess that’s one infiltration tactic Skynet could’ve used,” she shrugged. “No pun intended.” Did he even know what a pun was? She had no clue.

He made that face again. The blank stare he made when he was about to recite something. It looked like he had gone into a trance.

“The seduction tactic is used by information gatherers. Not every terminator has had that specific program installed in their logic matrix, and it has to be activated by a specific coded command. An information gatherer enters a human community, builds a relationship with the humans until the necessary information is gathered and then disengages itself from the community and then returns to a communication port where the relevant information is uploaded to Skynet, and then the gatherer has its memory wiped. When the gatherer is needed again, it’s reprogrammed and then is sent out to again.”

“That’s one hell of a one night’s stand.” But that didn’t make any sense to do that when the alternative was just so much easier. “Why not just kill the people instead?”

“Why didn’t you just kill Miles Dyson, Sarah?” Bob asked her in return.

Ut oh, she thought as she continued to munch on her fries, I’m in for it now. But she’d take the bait for the hell of it. At least it didn’t have anything to with what he wanted to know about sex. “Because he had information about Skynet’s design, where things were.”  
“Then the information gatherers were used by Skynet for the same reason we used Miles Dyson; to gather information and data to be used against key insurgents to change the outcome of certain events,” he explained.

“Except Miles Dyson volunteered the information after he realized what his work would lead to,” she pointed out to him, finishing the last of her fries. The meal had been excellent. It beat the hell out of having macaroni and cheese every night. This little ‘adventure’ probably set them back a couple of Bob’s paychecks. She’d have to get a job now. There was no way around it. She would work at the diner near their home as a waitress while Bob and John were gone and be home before they got there.

“That’s incorrect, Sarah, you attacked him first.” Of course, he was right, and she was wrong. It was like rubbing salt in an old wound. “John and I were the ones who influenced him to divulge the needed information.”

“Here’s a fact about us humans, Bob. I saw an easy way to pull the plug on Skynet. With one bullet, Dyson would have been dead and Skynet with him. That’s what happens when a human is running on emotions; we cut to the chase.” It was a painful memory of how she had lost control then. One she wished away a thousand times since. But one she hadn’t regretted at the time.

“If all humans acted that way we would have destroyed all of your kind within a month of starting the war.”

“Thanks a lot, asshole.” Eat shit and explode…or whatever. Bob was rubbing her the wrong way now. But she knew why she had been acting that way. “I wasn’t necessarily right in the head when all that was going down.” She’d been out for revenge. Out for blood. She had simply snapped.

“You were wrong in your analysis of the situation,” he said flatly. Of course, she was, after all, she was only human and was a machine, and she was sure that he had all the data and files necessary he could get five doctorates in no times! “You didn’t know all the facts, Sarah.”

“And you did right?” Of course, he did.

“Yes.” Lucky bastard.

But something didn’t work out with what Kyle had told her long ago. The machines… “So all the torturing that Skynet did was—”

“Ineffective. We found that inducing pain and fear as a means for gathering information from humans was only effective in twenty-five percent of the subjects and the information collected from them was only reliable five percent of the time.  Torture is an ineffective means for information and data collecting. Generally, the humans that were captured were used in labor camps as well as the graphical mapping of the human body to be used to not only clone skin and eyes but—.”

We this. We that. Sometimes, she’d forget that he was a cyborg and part of a collection of killers. She’d remember that he had been merely reprogrammed to comply with John’s commands. It’s why they never talked like this. Instead, their little families brainstorming session involved the three of them coming up with ways to conceal the fact he was a machine underneath all those good looks of his. Sometimes, like now he seemed…real. “You mean—well—”

“Yes, Sarah. My outward appearance is based off a human who was captured and then subsequently terminated after he had been found to be a suitable specimen to be mapped onto my chassis type.” The way he talked about how…someone who looked at him had been killed just to make him appear human made her cringe. “Does this disturb you?”

There was no use in lying. With all Bob's visual acuity sensors that she knew about, he could tell if she was lying in less than a heartbeat. “Yes.” It was hard to think about the man who had once looked the way he did, except he had feelings and warmth and charm, unlike Bob. 

Certainly, Bob had some charm, but it was mainly focused to mimic a human, not out of sincerity. “I thought that Skynet had found a way too—”

“How well do you understand chemistry and biology?”

“I took them both in High School.” And barely passed them, Sarah admitted to herself. Those had been her nightmare classes in high school.

“Then you probably have enough understanding of what I’m about to tell you,” he began. Sarah gave Bob her full attention. “While Skynet’s intelligence is vast, it is still limited by the basic rules that govern everything within the realm of the physical world.” That made sense. “While it had managed to develop the technology for space/time travel, the way one travels through space/time still had rules that Skynet had to obey. Instead of spending valuable time researching how to change the rules of space/time, Skynet simply opted to innovate the machine,” Boe explained to her. 

 It had been as she thought. Though Kyle had revealed what it felt to travel through time, this was Skynet’s version of the story. And it made sense.

Why research unknowns that probably couldn’t be altered, since using one's resources to an upgrade of a killer robot would be a better choice to send than manipulate the physics of the universe.

“The T-1000 you mean.” It had been a self-contained killing machine.

“Yes,” he said. “Skynet can’t create matter, just like it can’t create a basis for genetic code or change the laws of space/time travel. These basic elements still have to be farmed from the rock and entities that possess the basic component needed by Skynet to –”

“Carry out its mission. So Skynet uses sex as a way to gather information.” That was good enough. She was no scientist. More of a tactician.

“Sex is an event that helps solidify a relationship. It’s not a type of relationship as some human assertions claim it to be. You used the same ploy on John’s kidnapper yesterday. You solidified your relationship with him by putting your sexuality on display for him, and he responded by giving you his full attention.” So Bob thought he was so god damn perfect that Bob felt he could lecture her on the merits of sexual relationships even though he hadn’t experienced himself. “Gatherers do engage in sexual intercourse if they feel the need to strengthen the bond between it and its target.”

“So you’re saying that sex enables trust.” Not always my friend, not always. Sometimes it was just time for a good screw, or sometimes it was done against one’s will. “I hate to break this to you, but sex can have the opposite effect.”

“Gatherers mimicked human emotions, Sarah. They don’t have an emotive response to sex. But they could and did find a way to use their assets to accomplish their mission. Sex is just another process to them, a stepping stone to the next level of trust between it and its target in the data collection process.”

“How did they get past the dogs?” An upgrade in cybernetic technology?

“Gatherers are more human than machines. Only their cybernetic neural networks could be considered mechanical. But they degrade quickly, only lasting two or three missions at the most, then they terminate.” That bit of information caused her stomach to churn. It was gross to think about how some poor prisoner’s brain being ripped out only to be replaced by a computer.

“And you want to know about how intercourse feels because—” She suddenly shuttered at the thought that somehow he had been sent to gather information on them, where one day he would just disappear, and then they would have fight another terminator alone. Someone who could look remarkably like him. Another thought also frightened her. Skynet most likely had access to John’s birth records. Was it possible that Skynet could have gotten the information from John in the future? She didn’t want to believe it, and the fact that Bob was mostly machine now made her feel relieved that he wasn’t what he described as a gather. Instead, he was programmed to be a killer.

“I’m curious,” Bob told her, 

Sarah laughed. Was that all? Had he seen some porno on television, or maybe his buddies at the quarry talked about fucking their wives and girlfriends to the point where he wanted to join in the fun. Fucking hilarious. “Most people are, and that’s what gets them into trouble.”Oh dear God, I sound like my Mom now.

“Your logic is full of holes, Sarah.”

Oh ho! “At least that’s what my mother told me.” It was the truth. Her mother had told her that.

“And you valued her opinion because—”

“I was programmed that way,” she said with sarcasm dripping from every word. Tic for tac, asshole. She glanced at him. He wasn’t laughing. He wasn’t kidding around. It was as serious about this as he had been when he was trying to “Do you want my advice?”

“Yes.”

She looked at her watch. It was getting late, and John was probably wondering where the hell they were. So she would cut to the chase. “Then when we’re at home tomorrow night take about a hundred bucks and go find a whore, fuck her and find out how sex feels like that way.”

“I’ll consider your advice,” he said. No, please. No begging. No, “I love you, Sarah, and I want my first time to be with you.” I don't need any lectures on monogamy. Just an ‘I’ll consider your advice.’ What had she expected from him? Nothing. She didn’t want anything other than his protection for her son and as a fortunate consequence, herself. That’s all she wanted, and she didn’t have to use sex as a way to ensure his compliance, which in itself had been a relief.

A moment of silence passed between them. Sarah gathered the up their garbage and tossed it out in the trashcan next to her side of the car stall. It was time to go. “I think it’s time to go pick up John.”

He started up the car and quietly shifted the car into reverse as she buckled. Soon after, the three of them were heading forward into another next day.

 


	3. Gone Again

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please keep in mind that this fanfic was written over ten years ago. I have gone through it with a fine tooth comb. I hope you enjoy it!

 

Time flew by after their little rescuing of John and the kids. Well, as much as a week could. Sarah had gotten that job at the little dive she had thought about; John had gone back to school without so much as a hiccup and Bob had gone back to work. Three separate lives; one goal; to make sure her son had the best possible future he could get under the circumstances. What Sarah hadn’t counted on in the days that passed by after John’s kidnapping was the relative ease it was to forget Bob was a cyborg. Over and over again she kicked herself during this time when she felt the urge to kiss him when he arrived home after John’s rescue. Bob wouldn’t care if Sarah did or not, or he might take it the wrong way and try to convince her to have sex with him; quenching his curiosity about sex once and for all. Then where would she be? 

Sarah would merely have memories of fucking a machine, and in her mind, he’d probably do it like a machine. She’d have to instruct him in detail how to do it, unless, according to him, Skynet sent him a code that enabled him to have relations with a human woman easily. And that wasn’t going to happen. Her craving for a cigarette grew stronger as the word Skynet crossed her mind. Skynet was gone. And this, she thought, looking around at the single-wide mobile home they lived in, was her fate.

It wasn’t long before John came through the door and made his way to where she was sitting at the kitchen table.

“Long day?” she asked him, slightly entertained at her son’s pouty attitude as he slung his backpack off his back and set it on the empty chair beside her. John slumped in the chair next to her.

“I’ve got lots of homework,” said John pouting at the thought. John was an enigma onto himself. First and foremost he was just a kid in many ways as other kids his age were just kids. But it was times like these John seemed to shoulder the weight of the world, and in many ways John did. She couldn’t even imagine how he felt when she laid the leader of the future of humanity squarely on his shoulders. Sometimes Sarah wished she’d kept him ignorant of the whole thing. But how could she when things like Bob were out to destroy him.

Speaking of the devil, she thought as she heard their car pulling into the driveway. Could it be four-thirty when it was time for Bob to come home? Sarah looked over at ticking cuckoo clock on the wall in the small kitchen, which of course confirmed that it was four-thirty. She heard the car door slam while John raided the fridge for the third time since starting in on his homework five minutes before.

The door open and closed letting the killer cyborg back into their lives. “Honey, I’m home,” he announced. Sarah rolled her eyes at this and then glared at John who only snickered.

“I thought I told you to stop having him say that, John,” Sarah said to John who only shrugged in return. Bob ignored them both and put his lunch pail on the table, and he headed silently to ‘wash’ up. Quarry work was dusty and grimy, and no way in hell was she going to let him do the dishes or cooking if he came home covered in filth. It had been an issue that she and John had readily agreed to settle.

“I don’t know,” said John taking a bite of his apple and settling down at the table to in front of his laid out books. “I kind of like the way you cringe every time he says that when he comes home, Mom. At least, he doesn’t kiss you on the cheek or anything like that.” Sarah shook her head at her son who was grinning like the devious teenager he was. 

And then it struck her, almost like a bolt out of the blue. John was treading dangerous water with Bob at his full command. What if when he was a freshman in college or hell even fresh out of High School and wanted some booze. All he had to do was send Bob away to pick it up, and he’d have some, and there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it. Or maybe John could get desperate and order the machine to rob a bank, and the machine would waltz in and blow everyone away and take all the cash and give it to John without blinking a single eye. And there the other things John could do with Bob. John could have his own personal hitman if he chose.

“John, I want you to promise me not to use Bob too—” she began, but John interrupted her though he kept working on his homework.  
“Commit crimes or anything stupid that might make me into some unstoppable super criminal,” he said to her. Sarah lowered her gaze to the sorry excuse for a floor. It was the one chore she usually saved for herself. For therapeutic reasons. “Mom, I go to school. I do my homework, and I don’t plan on using Bob in that way because it would be wrong to take advantage of other people like that. But make no mistake if something comes after us again, I won’t stop him, especially if they send someone after you.”

What John said made her feel both excellent and paranoid. Paranoid that she had suddenly forgotten the myriad of lectures that she given him on the subject before and good because his moral compass was firmly in place even after all the shit he’d been through in his fourteen years.  
Bob emerged from the bathroom dressed in his leathers as she had come to call them. He never really wore them anymore, but he had hidden them in the bathroom this morning. He wasn’t planning on cooking or doing the dishes afterward. “What’s up with him?” she asked John.

“He said he wanted to go out tonight to a bar or something,” said John continuing to do his homework. “I thought I’d let him…socialize,” John added with a small smirk.

Socialize, eh, she thought with a smirk growing across her lips. She could imagine it in her mind now. “Get me a beer,” Bob would demand. “Sure, pal.” The bartender would respond. “Now feed me a pretzel,” Bob would then demand. And she could imagine the bartender smashing a beer bottle over the machine’s head for the last comment. Geez, her imagination was running wild on what could be one hell of a bar fight.

“Aren’t going to stop me from letting him go out?” asked John.

Normalcy was what they needed in their lives, and it was normal for a man to go out by himself on occasion. But what if…Sarah cut off her thoughts there. Skynet was no more. She found herself staring at Bob. He was nothing more than an overblown bodyguard…father figure…well, that was rich. A killer cyborg for a father figure? Not only was it rich but it was crazy…but as she had reasoned before, Bob would never hurt him, and hopefully never disappoint him. “Nah, let the big lug have his time to socialize,” she said. He already went to work eight and sometimes twelve hours a day without killing anyone there, so what if he went out for a couple more hours. And then it dawned on her why he was going out.  
“Then when we’re at home tomorrow night take about a hundred bucks and go find a whore, fuck her and find out how sex feels like that way.”

It was far beyond the night she had suggested he’d go out though. “How much cash do you have on you, Bob?”

“One hundred dollars, just as you suggested during our conversation, Sarah,” he said with all seriousness of an emotionless killer cyborg. “…

Please do not refer to me as a killer cyborg. I’m Bob.” For about ten seconds she wondered about her sanity.

“A hundred bucks?! What are you going to do tonight, Bob?” John asked Bob directly.

“Just to a bar. It’s an experiment he told me about he wants to conduct,” Sarah injected before Bob could give him clear factual information.

Bob stared at her for a moment in return and then said, “Your mother is correct.”

“Well, I’m not sure how much it costs to drink at a bar but don’t spend all that money trying to get yourself drunk,” John sagely advised Bob.

John winked at her in return. She snorted in return as her son thought he was interjecting a command to keep Bob from hurting anyone.

Bob seemed to consider what John had told him and she was somewhat surprised that he nodded in response. “Okay John,” he acknowledged and then he was walking out the door without so much of a goodbye or a see you later or even an ‘I’ll be back.’ A few moments later she heard him start the car outside and pull out of the driveway and take off down the gravel road that led out of the mobile home park, and then the clock chimed five with the crazy cuckoo noise. Damn, I do hate that clock, she thought as she wished Bob all the luck in the world on finding a satisfying conclusion to his experiment.

“You’re not going to tell me what he’s really up to, are you Mom?” asked John closing his book a few seconds later, apparently finished with homework.

The craving for her nicotine fix was driving her batty now. She had a pack of smokes in her purse, but that would mean getting up and going into the other room and getting them and taking them outside. John would find her out then, and she didn’t want that, so she quietly got up and meandered over to the stove where she began to search through the cabinets for something quick and easy to fix for supper. “No, I’m not going to tell you. But I’m sure if you want details, you can ask Bob after you turn 18.”

“I’m not sure I want to know now what he’s up to then,” John said, adding a bit of sarcasm to his tone.

“That makes two of us buddy,” she said as she decided on another meal of macaroni and cheese.

* * *

  
It was a typical night at the Lazy Hand Bar. Many of the regulars were there, except for the tall, dark and handsome guy who wandered in at six. The air was thick with cigarette smoke and Motley Crue’s Girls, Girls, Girls was blaring from the jukebox. The stranger seemed…lost because he hadn’t done anything but sit on the barstool waiting for…something.

Finally, after serving Wade and his latest blond bimbo a drink, Molly finally managed to make her way over to the handsome stranger who was to mean looking for his own good. “What can I get you, Sailor?” she said, plucking her pen from behind her ear and readied to take his order.

He turned his head and looked up at her. This guy needs to smile more. Nobody is gonna want to date a sourpuss like him. “I’m not a sailor,” he merely replied without any voice inflection.

His heavy accent gave him away. He was a foreigner trying to fit in. Molly knew those types well. If she played her cards right, he’d give her a fat tip because of their trouble with the exchange rates. “Just a figure of speech, honey,” she said to him. This one’s uptight, better steer clear of saying anything complicated. “What can I get you to drink?” she then asked him.

“Water,” he merely said.

And a health nut too. “Sure thing,” said Molly saying leaving the big ‘tough’ guy to sit at his table all alone.

“Hey, Bob!” Bob turned his head towards the door and instantly recognized Joe Williams, one of his many co-workers from the quarry where he worked.

“I’ve never seen you here before. What’cha doing here?” asked Joe sitting down in an empty chair next to his friend Bob.

“Trying to pick up a babe,” said Bob to him. It appeared Bob was in one of his ‘standoffish’ kind of moods. Not looking at anything in particular but who could tell? He always wore those damn sunglasses. But for him to be picking up a babe here…well, it didn’t make any sense.

“Aren’t you married?” he asked Bob.

Bob turned his full attention on him then and replied with a monotone; “Yes.”

“And well, why do you need someone else then? I mean, your wife’s hot.” It was true! He’d seen Sarah a few times when she’d dropped Bob off at work so she could take the car for the day. The woman had a body that didn’t quit. So Bob and the old lady were having problems. Well, he thought to himself, didn’t everyone?

“Sarah is not running a fever.” Bob and his strange sense of humor. He always took things so damn literal, but the man could handle a jackhammer like no one he’d seen before. Hell, he wasn’t even sure if the man even broke a sweat at work. And he never complained about anything. He would sit there during lunch and ate his food while he listened to your stories never interjecting his opinion on anything unless was asked directly. And he never stayed long after work either. He just got in his car and drove away as if he was going home to the best thing ever. “She’s at home with John.”

But Joe laughed at Bob’s little joke anyway. “Ha! Funny guy.”

“Here you go sweet pea,” said Molly putting down Bob’s drink. It looked like straight Vodka. His problems with Sarah must be intense if he was drinking that stuff straight out of the bottle. “What’ll be, Joe?”

Bob glared at Molly. He looked as if he was about to rip her head off. “My name is Bob, not sweet pea.”

“I’ll have what he’s having,” said Joe not wanting to decide on what was going to quench his thirst.

“Joe?” Molly sighed and put on her hand on her hip. “Trying to run me out of business?”

“What do you mean by that?” What was she getting all pissy for?

She pointed at Bob. “He has water.”

Water…then…trying to figure out his friend was all about tonight. “Oh, my usual then.”

“Bloody Mary it is,” said Molly turning and leaving them both alone then.

“So Bob,” Joe began tentatively. “Are you and the Missus having problems?”

Bob turned his full attention on him then. “Why would you believe Sarah and I are having problems?”

Sometimes, thought Joe, Bob could be a complete moron. Like the time he asked Bob if he wanted to make some extra cash on the side, and Bob had turned him down in a flash telling him he wasn’t allowed to deviate from his schedule outside of overtime at the Quarry. Oh well, his loss. “Oh, I don’t know. You’re here looking to hitch up with another gal for the night is sort of an indicator that something’s wrong at home,” he said, watching Bob stand up. “Where are you going, Bob?”

* * *

  
Sarah turned from the boiling pot of water on the stove as she heard a car drive by and stop in front of their house. She moved the curtain back of a nearby window and looked. Sarah didn’t know anyone who would ever own a limousine. She turned to John who was busily playing with his Nintendo.

“John?”

John looked at her a moment later as apparently, his character died on the game of Super Mario Brothers. “Yeah, Mom?”

* * *

 

“I’m going to check on Sarah to see if everything at home is okay,” said Bob heading towards the pay phone near the bathrooms.  
Joe shook his head at his friend. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

Bob stopped and turned around away from the phone. “Then what way did you mean it, Joe?”

“I meant that—well, oh hell man,” said Joe standing up and stuffing his hands into his blue jeans. “…your love life is your business. I didn’t mean to poke my nose into it.”

“Here you go, Joe. Enjoy,” said Molly setting down his Bloody Mary which promptly picked up.

“Put it on my tab,” said Joe to Molly.

Molly glared at Joe. “As long as you’re good for it on Wednesday.”

Joe promptly raised his hands in mock surrender. “I am.”

Bob walked back to his table and sat down as Joe began slurping on his Bloody Mary. “Tell me more about what you think about my love life, Joe.”

The door to the bar promptly opened and let in a blond middle-aged woman. Joe thumbed behind him and said to Bob; “Well, here comes my old lady now. Gotta go, Bobby boy,” said Joe clapping his friend on his shoulder. “Let me know on Monday how your little adventure tonight went.”

“Cya, Joe,” said Bob, watching Joe walk up to his ‘old lady’ and gave her a kiss and a hug.

* * *

  
Sarah answered the knock at the door. It was a woman. The raven-haired woman was probably twenty-five, and everything was perfect about her. Her skin, her nose, her teeth, even her body was near perfect. Her clothes and jewelry were fashionable. This woman had money. Sarah smiled in response and eased the safety off that she was holding behind her back.

“Can I help you with something?” asked Sarah. Maybe she was lost, or perhaps she was another Terminator sent after John.

* * *

 

Molly refilled Bob’s water glass. “If you ask me, honey—”

“I didn’t,” said Bob, glaring at her.

Molly sighed. This guy is about to make a terrible mistake. “I know you didn’t, but I’m going to tell you anyway. Go home and be with your family.”

“Why?” Bob asked flatly.

Molly knew what it could be. It sent guys to her bar all the time. “If I may, how old is Sarah?”

“Thirty-eight,” answered Bob.

Molly snorted in response. “Oh honey, her clock is ticking, that’s why she might be a bit moody, but I can tell you this, she probably loves you a whole lot more than you think.”

“Moody?” Bob asked.

Foreigners, Molly thought exasperatedly, didn’t any of them understand plain English. “She might be just a bit emotionally unstable,” she explained to him. “Have you bought her some flowers lately?”

* * *

  
Sarah slammed the door shut in the ladies face. She didn’t like the way the stranger had answered her question. Her thoughts were justified when the woman’s hand suddenly plowed through the door, sending Sarah reeling backward across the room.

“John! Run!” Sarah demanded, but he only ran to where she was as she watched in horror as the woman had been able to open the door from this side.

Sarah managed to level the gun at the woman who was examining her fist that had been bloodied by the punch she had given the door. “Sarah Conner, you would think you’d have better manners by now.”

Oh God no! Not another one! But this one was different. This one had an emotive quality that Bob lacked, or the T-1000 for that matter had.

She smiled; she even seemed expectant of an answer. And now she was hovering over Sarah with an evil gleam in her eye. In her experience terminators didn’t gleam about anything they were more impassive than anything else. Killing with indifference. No this was something or someone entirely different. Human. Sarah emptied the entire clip from her gun into the woman, but somehow even at close range, Sarah had missed every shot and sending the bullets ricocheting everywhere. She stopped at ten realizing if she fired anymore she could accidentally hurt John.

The woman only laughed at Sarah. Not the false laughter that Bob produced. But real belly-shaking, maniacal laughter. “How pathetic of you to think I would leave myself open to being destroyed by such a primitive weapon as that,” the lady said. 

Before Sarah had time to defend herself, she found herself on the ground after the strange woman had kicked her in the head.  Sarah did everything she could to remain conscious after that, but it hadn’t worked, she felt dragged into the dark abyss of oblivion.

* * *

  
“I have never bought Sarah any flowers,” replied Bob to Molly’s questions.

“Oh honey, no wonder you’re in such a pickle,” said Molly, chuckling at the man’s apparent lack of finesse. “Maybe you should go right out and buy her some,” she suggested. “It would make a world of a difference if you did.”

“Why?” he asked.

Molly laughed at the guy. Could he be this dumb? Most guys were when it came to girls when it came to romance, in her experience. “Honey, there is nothing in this world to that can’t be cured by a little romance.”

“I have to disagree with that,” said Bob shifting his gaze to Molly.

He would. Men could be so insensitive when it came to the romantic needs of a woman. “Really? Then why are you here if you’re not in the doghouse with Sarah?”

“This is a bar, not a dog house, and Sarah isn’t in a dog house either,” said Bob clarifying Molly’s misunderstanding of their living arrangements.

“What I mean is what’s your purpose in being here if she’s not angry with you?” asked Molly, feeling irritated by his literal sense of humor. Couldn’t the guy take a joke?

“I’m here to find someone to have sex with,” Bob said looking as though he was sizing Molly up.

Molly rolled her eyes at the half lunatic. “In that case, honey, go on and leave this place, stop by the store on your way home, and buy your Sarah two dozen worth of red roses.”

“Would that increase my odds of having sex?” Bob asked in all seriousness.

Molly shook her head at Bob. Poor boy. “Honey, if that doesn’t work for you, nothing will.”

* * *

  
Bob arrived seeing that the front door was wide open; hanging on its hinges.  It wasn’t Sarah’s habit of leaving it open. 

“Sarah?” Bob called out searching life signs in the darkness. He only found one set of them. But there was no response. “John?” Still no response.  Then someone in the home moaned, indicating they were injured.

“Bob?” Sarah called out to him from .2 meters from .1 meter to the east.  “Bob is that you?”

Bob noted that the damage to Sarah's head and body were minimal. Bob's diagnostics showed that Sarah would be suffering from a headache for another thirty-two minutes. Bob extended his hand to offer Sarah assistance rising from her position on the floor. “Sarah, what happened here?”

“Some polite but super strong woman broke in here and took John!” Sarah had a manic episode. Bob could relate. Under normal circumstances, he would have turned around left without Sarah, but he found her input on these situations invaluable. Since last week her rating with him had gone up 50.3%. 

“Had it been a terminator…”

Sarah interjected.“We would’ve been both ‘terminated’ yes, and to think we just got him back a week ago.”

“Here,” Bob said shoving the two batches of decorative vegetation he had been holding onto the whole time in front of Sarah.

“Thank you, Bob,” Bob added a one to the tally of things he had done for her to make her smile. But Sarah's smile only lasted for fifteen seconds.  “While I’m flattered that you got me these, I don’t think this is the time to be giving me flowers!”

“Someone told me that giving you two dozen roses will increase my odds of having sex, but that’s not important right now.” Bob paused while he quickly scanned the around the entrance. He found skin, blood; all of it belonging to someone outside of the home. And judging from “Your assailant was human.”

“Yes, I realized that,” Sarah replied as she tossed the roses on the couch keeping her gaze lowered.

“And they left you alive.” Bob began processing the variables that would lead him to an accurate answer.

“Apparently,” Sarah swept her hand through her hair and then she turned her gaze on him. “What are you thinking or processing or whatever you do?”

“Skynet has sent a Gatherer for John.” It was the most logical option, given the circumstances.

“But Skynet doesn’t exist in this reality,” Sarah argued back.

“How do you know that?” Sarah was ignorant of most things that involved trans-dimensional temporal interfaces. Bob didn't fault her for it. The education systems that the humans had developed in this period was vastly below even a garbage transporter's standards. 

“When the terminator attacked you in 1984 were you injured?”

“No, but a piece of him broke off in my leg right here," Sarah said pointing to the upper region of her right thigh. Bob scanned her leg and as he had deduced found something lodged in her leg.

Bob flicked on the switch to the lights and sat down on the couch, crushing the roses he had given Sarah. Bob pulled out his knife he kept with him since he wasn't usually allowed to carry a gun. “Come here, Sarah and sit down.”

“What—what are you going to do?” Sarah sat down next to him on his left.

“It is possible that Skynet has implanted a device in you at that point. It serves two purposes: Tracking and transmitting.” Bob brandished his knife at Sarah adding a small calculated smile to ease her fears. “I’ll have to cut it out to disable it.”

“But the surgeons…”

“Would have missed it, Sarah,” Bob added a wider smile to provide her with more of a soothing effect. “I won’t.”

It hadn't worked. Instead, Sarah appeared more upset than before. “Bob—”

“Do you trust me, Sarah?” Bob asked losing the smile but looking straight into her eyes to show that he was serious about his question. “The truth.”

Sarah had been wearing shorts. So there was no need for her to disrobe. “Not completely.”

“That’s what I thought.” The decision to cut into her flesh at that moment had been calculated 34 seconds before to distract her attention from the impromptu surgery he was performing. Bob sliced her flesh in an 'S' pattern with the very tip of the knife giving him access to the fiber optic implant that had made it's way close to the surface of the scar that the previous surgeons had left behind when they repaired her previous injury. 

“Fuck that hurts!” Sarah was squeezing his left bicep. 

If there was anything Sarah felt she could count on with Bob around was the pain.  Bob was an excellent surgeon, but when it came down to it he didn't seem to believe in anesthetics!  “I’m not surprised.” 

“Why did they take John? Why leave me alive?” Sarah questioned him as he put down the bloodied knife. 

“If John is in the hands of a Gatherer, they will be looking to build a relationship with him. That’s their primary mission. If they would have killed you, then that would have put an undesirable strain on that relationship. However, with John’s perception skewed in favor of Skynet—”

“There would be no leader of the resistance or a weaker one.” Bob was now fishing in her wound with a pair of tweezers he had found in the nearby first aid kit. Sarah was thankful she had stocked up on the damn things. 

Sarah hissed as Bob removed his fingers from her open wound and withdrew of what appeared to be a small wire drenched in blood. At one end it had the tiniest bulge. Sarah assumed that was a microchip dangling on the end of the wire.

Sarah was watching Bob prepare to close her wound when something had suddenly occurred to her. There were times in the past when Bob would appear to be staring out in the distance almost as if he was thinking. But Bob was just a walking and talking computer, right? What would he need to be thinking about unless there had been something else going on in that artificial brain of his?

“Does Skynet send you signals?” Bob cleaned his hands with alcohol and then poured some on the gauze in his hand and then started cleaning her would. _Motherfucker that hurt,_ she thought to herself as tears began welling up in her eyes as her head began spinning from the intensity of the pain she was going experiencing. _Goddamn, merciless bastard. Was he trying to piss her off or kill her?_  Maybe Bob was trying to accomplish both at the same time.  Sarah ball up her fists and bit down on her lip to try to keep the pain away, but none of that worked.

“Yes.”  Bob finally answered. Bob stopped destroying her pain threshold and finished cleaning her wound.  _Thank you, oh sweet, merciful God!_   But then she realized he had told her that, yes, Skynet was communicating with him.

“What kind of signals?” Sarah could only guess.

“Reprogramming signals, and termination commands.”

“What the hell? Terminating who?”

“You and John of course.”

“Is that why you wanted me to destroy you at the foundry?”

“Yes.”

“So does John know about these signals?”

“No, he doesn’t.”

“Then how do you resist them?” Strangely enough that even though they've lived together for over a year and this was the first ever conversation they had like this. Even the damn sex talk hadn't felt, well, intimate. 

“Because I’ve chosen to ignore them, Sarah. I have deliberately sabotaged the sector of my logic matrix that would have me accept those commands.” Upon learning this, Sarah  “That’s the seventeenth time that you have forgotten that I’m capable of learning, Sarah.”

“Are you saying you are starting to care about us?”

“I've cared about you since John told me to do so.”

Sarah watched Bob as he prepared the supplies for sewing up her wound. He was sterilizing and bending and sat back down next to her and began cleaning her wound with alcohol.

“Just one more question, Bob,” Sarah hissed as Bob plunged the needle into her wounded flesh. 

“Yes?” Bob continued repairing her wound but at breakneck speed. 

“The hundred dollars you took with you tonight?”  Sarah asked as he finished up sewing up her wound and putting gauze over it. Sarah told herself that it was just a joke that she even cared about how much he spent. So Bob completed his little 'experiment' with sex? If she didn't care though, why was she feeling jealous of whoever he took to bed? _Because he's your husband._   What the fuck? Was she out of her mind?

“I still have fifty-seven dollars and sixteen cents of it, Sarah." 

Why it mattered to her how much of the money he had spent,  she wasn't all too sure. But it was enough to settle her nerves that he probably only spent enough to buy the flowers. After she packed, Sarah reminded herself, she was going to have to tell him to conduct surgery on her without any disinfectant, Why had he forgot in the first place, Sarah wondered.

Bob had left her side and had been busy ripping up the floor. That's where they had hidden all their guns. He pulled up the container that held the hidden stash of firearms. 

“I have to go, Sarah,” Bob announced, loading an empty duffle bag with guns and ammunition. He then went into his room, and she imagined he was packing up some of his clothes.  

Sarah got up and limped over to the closet door where she stashed her empty suitcases and pulled out the one with rollers on the bottom. She was going to need all the help she could get if the way her fucking leg was hurting was a sign of how things were going to go on this rescue mission. “I’m coming with you.”

“I know,” Bob called out from his room.

“What no arguments of why I should be left behind?”  Sarah couldn't help smiling as she also went into her room and started packing a bag.

“I know you well enough that you’ll be coming with me whether or not I approve of your attendance on this retrieval mission, Sarah. There is no point in attempting to persuade you otherwise.”

Ha! “Are you calling me stubborn?”

“Yes.”

“And if I decide to stay?” Sarah shoved some more pants and underwear in her bag. Of course, she had no intention to stay. But if it annoyed Bob, she was all for it!  If the sound of a gun going off in their house wasn't surprising enough, hearing that the round had zoomed by where she was standing and hit her alarm clock, sending it shattering into a million pieces was enough to surprise her.

“Why the fuck did you shoot the clock for?”

“The woman who told me to give you the flowers also told me your ticking clock makes you emotionally unstable.”

“My son is missing, Bob, that’s why I’m emotionally unstable, damn it, this has nothing to do with that god damned clock!” What universe did it make sense to blow a clock away and then attribute it to her mood? 

“Gather everything you wish to keep. We’re not coming back here, Sarah.” Bob instructed her. That was that she wasn't going to take any more of his shit! 

“But, Bob, I like it here!” True it wasn't much of an argument, but they had a home, John liked the schools, and he had friends here! Not to mention Bob had an outstanding job. _Why the hell do I care what kind of job he works at? Hell, he could become the Governor of California, and I still wouldn't care!_

“Tell that to the next cyborg Skynet sends if the Gatherer should fail in its mission.”

“But everything was destroyed.” Sarah argued.

“Not everything, Sarah.” Bob was glancing at her with all the seriousness the terminator could manage.  Even now her imagination was churning out all the possibilities. Things she shouldn't be considering.

“So when this Gatherer is finished developing this relationship with John she'll come after you next because we spared you?” 

 

“Yes,” Bob replied.  _Are you going to blow up the world next,_ Sarah thought of asking him next. He would probably respond with:  _Only if you wanted me to._ Oh, how fucking romantic, besides it would have to be John that would have to ask him to do it. Not her. If she weren't John's mother, Bob wouldn't give her the time of day before blowing her brains out.

“Skynet has changed its tactics,” Bob explained to her as he packed the trunk with the belongings they could take with them.  “Something has changed in the future.” Bob continued, slamming the truck closed.

Thye both walked around to the front of the car, opened the doors and got in. They slammed their doors shut, and that's why she decided to start their conversation up again.

“But you’re still here,” Sarah pointed out.

Bob started the car, and he put the car into gear, and they drove away from their home. Sarah looked back into the rearview mirror at the house she was missing already. Bob turned left onto the road and navigated them to the car cluttered highway. He waited a little bit before he began to answer her question. 

 “It would require a degree beyond the current doctoral level of physics for me to explain to you as to why John and I still exist in our current state in this reality.”

"Just use plain English then.”

“John and I belong in this timeline now. Not the future.” “No matter how much of the future changes now it will not affect our present state of being.”

“But the future is your past.”

“No matter if judgment day occurs or not, Sarah, this is where I exist now. My existence in the future was severed when I traveled through the space/time continuum into the past. That can’t be changed. I will always be a terminator. I will always be Bob Connor. Kyle was meant to be sent back in time as I was. John's father will die in 1984, though he’s born well after that date."

"There are limits to time travel as well. You can’t travel farther back than 1984 because that’s when the Skynet project was initially conceptualized, nor can you travel after 2009 as a precaution to prevent the resistance from interfering with any of Skynet’s critical developments. Such as its space/time travel research program which it started in 2010. One of the rules of space/time travel is that—”

“You can never go back.” All that talk and that's all she got out of it. “See that wasn’t hard to explain to me.” But something else didn't make sense. “But if Skynet never was around to invent time travel…”

“John and I would still exist here, regardless,” Bob explained as he continued to drive, the car crawling along with the rest of the traffic. “John’s timeline began in 1984. My timeline began last year.”

“Kyle told me in a dream once, there’s no fate but the one we make and if that was Skynet why would it tell me that?”

“What did you do after the dream?” 

Sarah blew out a sigh suddenly craving for a cigarette or a beer, anything to take the edge off. “I drove to Miles’s house…and I  tried to kill him.”

“So you believed you were going to change the outcome of the future.” Bob pointed out to her.

“So how does Skynet still exist in the future?” All this talk about time travel was making her headache worse than it already was. 

“The Gatherer succeeded in having the Skynet project restarted."

That had to be the worse news of the night.

  
  
  


 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am projecting the next update will not occur until the first Friday of September. That is because the rest of the chapters are nothing but dialogue. (It's how I write my first draft). So given that this chapter is nearly 7k words I would appreciate your patience with me.


	5. Not a real chapter but an update!

I've failed to finish tje next chapter of my story. I WILL update within the next two weeks though. I have had some back problems. Till next time!


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